One very clear manifestation of this is the rise of SAFe.īut the more recent manifestation, as in the quote above, and the one I wrote about in the recent article Process People, is using Product Ops as a Trojan Horse to bring back in the people, practices and especially the command and control mindset of the old style PMO.Īm I being paranoid here? Maybe. However, they’ve been seeking a way back in for years. In many companies, when Agile came in, the command and control style PMO (Program Management Office) was displaced. We are the first point of engagement for stakeholder requests, and we manage timelines and deliverables.” – VP Product Ops for large hardware appliance company We are responsible for putting standard operating procedures and governance in place around our unified lifecycle. We also facilitate the execution by coordinating and tracking activities across the organization from launch to sunsetting. “ At our company, Product Ops facilitates planning activities – long range planning, roadmap planning, and portfolio planning. Here are the various definitions I have personally encountered, presented in the order that I consider most damaging, to most valuable: But don’t take that to mean there is no value in Product Ops as a concept, as I believe there is, and I’ll make that case below. At least as practiced in good product companies. I mean new as in the last couple of decades.
And I don’t mean new as in the last couple of years. Third, despite so many different definitions, I should warn you up front that I have yet to find anything that is actually new. Second, there are defenders out there for each of the definitions of Product Ops that I describe, and I encourage you to listen to their arguments, and draw your own conclusions. But as you’ll see, many of the problematic definitions of product ops out there are a reaction to the deeper issues, especially of feature teams, and slapping the label “Product Ops” on a fundamentally limited model won’t fix those issues. I make no apology for that, as there are plenty of people out there who cater to the rest. So in this article I want to try to encourage companies to both be wary of the unhelpful definitions, but also to consider embracing what I think is a valuable and helpful definition of Product Ops.īut before I share my observations, I need to provide a few caveats:įirst, remember that the focus of my work is on those product companies, product leaders and product teams that are trying to work like the best companies. As you might imagine, I love the concept of empowering product managers and product teams to help them do good work, and I do think there are very good ways to leverage the potential of Product Ops to better empower product managers and product teams. Regardless of whether my theory is correct, the first thing to realize is that if a company says “we have Product Ops,” that’s a fairly meaningless statement today.īut please don’t misunderstand me. So it creates this nice big placeholder called “Product Ops” that is general enough, and fashionable enough, that it’s tempting for a company to use it to address perceived organizational needs related to product. That said, the concept of empowering product managers to do good work, much like we empower engineers, resonates very easily. I think that’s partly because there are already plenty of off-the-shelf solutions for the major tools like roadmap and OKR tools, but mainly because unlike engineering, for most things PM’s do, it’s simply not a function of the tools, so the original meaning of DevOps doesn’t really apply so well to product management.
#Product overview code
My theory is that while the term emerged as a roughly parallel concept to DevOps, the original concept of DevOps refers primarily to tools and technology to empower engineers to accelerate their code into production, but I haven’t encountered anyone trying to do roughly analogous tooling for product managers (other than tool vendors of course). So the first and most obvious question is why so many different definitions? ” Which might be true, but isn’t very helpful.įrom my own interactions with companies implementing or exploring Product Ops, I have found no fewer than six distinct definitions.
As Product School says in their survey article trying to define what Product Ops is: “ Product Ops operates differently at every company.